Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] Unification of user message strings

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:36:29 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 06:51:42PM +0100, Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote:
>
>> Rewrite user messages to stick to a uniform style for all messages.
>> From the surrounding code, the following guidelines were deduced:
>> - messages start with a capital,
>
> I was surprised by this one, as I think we generally use lower-case
> messages. Grepping shows that lower-case has a slight edge, though it is
> far from decided:
> ...
> PS I was curious if it was simply that some people prefer one way and
>    not the other, but the results are quite mixed. Below is the result
>    of a small script I wrote that calculates "upper-casedness" per
>    author using the above regexes and git-blame.
> ...
>    You can see that some people are usually lowercase and some are usually
>    uppercase, but there are many people near 50%, doing both equally.
>    There's also some inaccuracy in my simplistic sampling. For example,
>    of my 13 upper-case messages, 11 of them are "BUG:".

I had a vague impression that plumbing messages tend to be lowercase.  If
it is not be too much trouble, it might be interesting to redo the numbers
divided into the plumbing and Porcelain messages. Perhaps these "50%"
folks updated both plumbing and Porcelain. Another possibility is that
they tried to follow the local convention when they added a new one, or
reworded an existing one.

If we would be rewording, we would only be doing the Porcelain messages,
so I am OK with either way.